Jean Basset (died 1707)
Jean Basset was a French Catholic missionary and Bible translator in China.
Basset was born around 1662 in Lyon. He entered the seminary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society in 1684 and in 1685 was sent as a missionary to Siam. In 1689 he arrived at Guangzhou in China. In 1692–93 he served as provicar of the mission in the province of Jiangxi. From 1702 he was an active evangelist in southern and western Sichuan. He died in Guangzhou in December 1707.
Basset translated from the Latin Vulgate into Chinese the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Pauline epistles and the first chapter of the Epistle to the Hebrews. The work was uncompleted at his death. A manuscript in which the Gospels had been condensed into a Gospel harmony was discovered by John Hodgson in China in 1738 and a copy made. This was given to Hans Sloane, who donated it to the British Museum. It served as a basis for the translation work of Robert Morrison. Basset also wrote a Chinese guide to the Bible in question-and-answer form, Ching-tien Chi-lüeh Wen-ta.
